Nomad is the latest offering from best selling Somalian author Ayann Hirsi Ali and is the follow up to her best seller autobiography ‘Infidel’ where she denounced Islam after 9/11…
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations
Ayann Hirsi Ali
RRP $38.99
Nomad is the latest offering from best selling Somalian author Ayann Hirsi Ali and is the follow up to her best seller autobiography ‘Infidel’.
In Infidel Ali writes about her strict Islamic upbringing where her family had to move around a lot to escape the effects of the civil war that was raging in Somalia at the time. She endured female circumcision, was subjected to physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her mother, escapes an arranged marriage, and finds asylum as a refugee in the Netherlands. She studied politics at university and had a brief career in politics as a member of Dutch parliament.
The turning point for in her life was on September 11 2001 where after the terrorist attacks in the United States she renounced Islam and later became an atheist. Her family mostly disowned her for this because in their eyes she is an ‘Infidel’.
Ali’s life took a dramatic turn when she collaborated with Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh and made a short film called ‘Submission’ which was a critic of women and Islam. Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamist extremist and Ali has had personal security ever since. Ali now resides in the United States which gave her the basis on her latest book Nomad which explores the difficulty of shedding old beliefs and embracing a new way of life.
Nomad seems fair more intimate than Infidel as Ali spends most of the book discussing the lives of different family members and how they are doomed because of their strict adherence to Islam. Nomad seemed to be Ali’s way of dealing with the impact of her abusive upbringing and the fact her family has shunned her. At times I found myself frustrated with Ali’s insistence that everything wrong with her family was because of Islam; her mother’s abuse and bitterness, her father essentially abandoning the family and two siblings mental illnesses. I found myself wondering whether these things could have been in fact a result of growing up in the middle of civil war and experiencing the traumas associated with that. She appears to grip onto the belief that Islam can only be practiced in a fundamental way and that Islam needs to go through modernity like Europe did.
I found it difficult to finish which was a contrast to Infidel which I couldn’t put down. Many of her thoughts are somewhat contradictory, for instance on one hand she sees her half-sister as a caged prisoner in her niqab (full face veil) but on the next page appears to be envious of her half-sister’s ease with her life as a practicing Muslim.
It was a somewhat self-indulgent book which was disappointing considering the compelling read she created in Infidel.
By Helen King, 20 July 2010.
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